Why Using Microstocks to Buy an Image?

Need to buy some photos or illustrations? Let PhotoBuyerGuide.com introduce you collections of high-quality licensed images at low prices. We will be your assistant while selecting the best source of suchlike content, basing on your needs and financial preferences.

Low-priced licensed images can be purchased on microstocks. Microstocks (stock photo agencies, photo stocks) are the web-sites where millions of royalty free pictures are offered at moderate prices (see "What is royalty free?"). Each user can buy here any picture having paid not a big amount of money.

How much is it? Let's say, one dollar. But if you buy a bundle of several tens or hundreds pictures then each of them will cost you just about 10 to 60 cents. Such a low price is possible because all of these images are being sold numerous times to many of buyers.

So, a good royalty free photo can be purchased thousands times, and in total it will bring a good money to a microstock. No charity. No cheating. Just making money while using the large turnover.

Microstocks Would Be Your Best Choice if:

you have your web-site or blog and you need high-quality pictures for designing or illustration;

you prepare some presentations or reports with cutting-edge images, making your documents looking more professionally;

you have a magazine or a book, impossible to be published without illustrations on the cover and on the pages;

you are designing an advertising banner for Internet, journal or billboard;

you search an image for a calendar or brochure;

you are a manufacturer of T-shirts, cups, cards and printed items;

… and so on, and so forth.

No matter which task you are going to deal with. If you need images and you are not planning to spend a lot of money for it, then your ultimate choice is microstock.

There is a lot of microstocks in the Web. Which one of them do you need? That's exactly the question which we will answer. Each of these microstocks has its own features, advantages, and restrictions, too. And it's quite a problem to find out the best solution, even if you spend several days on it. PhotoBuyerGuide.com will be your assistant and will solve this task in few minutes and with maximal result.

Three Advantages of Microstocks

1. From the plenty of microstocks we have selected seven (Shutterstock, iStockphoto, Fotolia, Dreamstime, 123RF, Bigstock and Depositphotos), and it is the best microstocks worldwide. Each of them offers millions of royalty free photographs and illustrations. They provide services of biggest image stores you can imagine and they have reasonable prices.

2. Images on these photo stocks are published by hundreds of thousands of photographers and artists from all over the world. An army of creative people is working on you and their services all together cost you cheaper than a salary of one staff designer or photographer.

Just an example: 750 high-quality and ready-to-use royalty free photos on any topic will cost you about $250. Yes, only $0.33 per image. Is your photographer ready for it?

Microstocks are a wonderful way to economize your money, whereas getting pictures of the new-level quality. It is the best opportunity to optimize costs while economic crisis.

3. Among stock content authors there are many famous professionals, whose works usually costs a great amount of money. Here you can buy their work per dollar or even less. Amazing payment for the prestige and quality guaranteed, isn't it?

Three Myths About Microstocks

1. These pictures are so cheap. They definitely are of a poor quality! Is it true?

False. Microstocks usually have strong requirements for the quality of image published for sale. Any picture published here must satisfy both a novice blogger and well-known international magazine.

The secret of low prices is very simple: each picture is sold many times, bringing a good profit to the microstock.

2. If each image is sold many times, so the buyer does not have exclusive rights on it, so he can possible meet the same picture at his competitor. Nobody cares?

Of course, microstock does not guarantee that royalty free image purchased by the buyer will not be used by someone else. But it is not problem at all. Readers do not care about looking at the same picture on different blogs, books, journals or advertisings.

What's more, such a "problem" is so minor, that even famous editions like TIME Magazine purchase pictures for their covers on microstocks. Get evidence: here is TIME Magazine cover, and here this picture is available on the iStockphoto. Look, how many times it was purchased.

Thus, even edition giants like TIME Magazine does not care about uniqueness. Do you still care about it?

3. So, if images do have high quality and big companies use microstocks, is it true that microstocks are not intended for individual users?

False. Microstocks could be used both by big companies and individual users, such as bloggers, web-designers etc. Minimal amount of balance refilling is $10 to $15 on the most microstocks, and you can do it through PayPal or credit card. Everything is easy and available for any, even inexperienced user.